Facebook has announced “Hip Hop”, a PHP to C++ compiler stack that they hope will overcome some of the scaling and speed issues associated with PHP apps.  The video above lays out the reasons they started the project and the types of things they want to accomplish with it.  As a PHP developer, this project is of great interest to me.  Most encouraging is the fact that someone other than Zend, the primary developers of PHP, is putting significant resources toward the popular language for Web apps.  The project is set to be released to the open source community in the near future.

The Wall Street Journal, quoting “people familiar with the matter,” reported Wednesday that International Business Machines was in talks to buy Sun for at least $6.5 billion in cash, a premium of more than 100 percent over the company’s closing share price Tuesday. Officials of Sun and IBM could not immediately be reached for comment.

This is an interesting development considering Sun’s recent acquisition of MySQL AB, and IBM’s speculated interest in Zend, the primary developers of PHP.  Such a series of purchases would put IBM in a solid position to start using buzzwords like “cloud computing.”

For almost ten years, my church’s Web site has gone relatively unchanged. The design had become dated and so had the process to add and update the content on it. Shortly after joining the church about two and a half years ago, I volunteered to take on or assist in a makeover project. It took a while for the stars to align, but after starting work a few months ago, we finally launched the redesign this week.

For the first time ever, I used the very popular Joomla! CMS. I have long been a proponent of Drupal over Joomla!, mainly due to the fact that Drupal seems more friendly to those who want to add their own PHP modules quickly. Joomla!, however, has a very rabid user-base that has produced a large number of usable plug-ins. This allowed me to produce a professional, interactive site with only a few lines of my own handcrafted PHP. This was definitely nice. While I still definitely love Drupal, I can see myself using Joomla! again in the future.

Feel free to let me know what you think of the redesign.